is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity.  Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text like a hawker,

Beating it in upon our weary brains,
As tho’ it were the burden of a song,

clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason.  These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once.  The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest soul resolved to stir them.  But he whose message is for minds attuned and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way of emphasis.  Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully whether the altered incidence does not justify and require an altered term, which the world is quick to call a synonym.  The right dictionary of synonyms would give the context of each variant in the usage of the best authors.  To enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the hero of Paradise Lost, without reference to the passages in which they occur, would be a foolish labour; with such reference, the task is made a sovereign lesson in style.  At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech with his leman Sin to gain a passage from the lower World, Satan is “the subtle Fiend,” in the garden of Paradise he is “the Tempter” and “the Enemy of Mankind,” putting his fraud upon Eve he is the “wily Adder,” leading her in full course to the tree he is “the dire Snake,” springing to his natural height before the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is “the grisly King.”  Every fresh designation elaborates his character and history, emphasises the situation, and saves a sentence.  So it is with all variable appellations of concrete objects; and even in the stricter and more conventional region of abstract ideas the same law runs.  Let a word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for it in the author’s purpose.